Vanishing Act – which makes clear that it is a drama, not a documentary (although there is a factual companion piece) or a documentary-drama – incorporates just about every suspicion and conspiracy theory that sprang up around what was headline news in Australia for weeks in 2021. Some people are just born acquisitive, but you watch the three episodes in vain for a hint of how and why, for a small percentage, this can transmogrify into “criminally greedy” and allow them to defraud their nearest and dearest without a qualm.Ĭaddick is the quintessential unreliable narrator. There is no explanation (beyond an early infatuation with a scam artist boyfriend) of why she might be like this. Caddick is a relentlessly unsympathetic figure – obsessed with the price of clothes and property, and always in pursuit of the next shiny bauble. Caddick’s telling of the story is pure froth, with superficial glamour that only briefly distracts from the fact that it is told without insight or charm and is increasingly at tonal odds with the suffering she caused. The real drama, in fact, lies in Angie and her fellow victims. She is glad her hard-earned family savings (and those of all the friends and relations she introduces to Caddick) are being invested wisely by her financially astute friend. Angie, her best friend since childhood, is content with her life as a nurse and is settled in the same area they grew up in. She owns a huge house and has a toyboy husband (I use that noun advisedly, because he seems to be there for little other than to run her errands).

In Vanishing Act, Caddick (Kate Atkinson) tells her own story, which opens with the discovery of the foot and works backwards.

In the meantime, it was discovered that she had been running a Ponzi scheme for over a decade, which, according to the show, took in more than A$40m (£20.5m) not just from strangers, but friends and family – including her parents – and left them all financially ruined. Four months later, her badly decomposed foot (confirmed by DNA testing) washed up on Bournda beach on the New South Wales coast 500km away from where she was last seen. It traces the disappearance of Melissa Caddick, a financier who vanished three days after the Australian Securities and Investment Commission raided her Sydney home. This is the first Australian contribution to the true-scam drama genre to make it to our shores. The answer, thanks to Vanishing Act, appears to be no – nowhere is safe. As for Bad Vegan, you’ll have to look that up yourself – it begins with a promise to make a restaurateur’s dog immortal and beyond that I do not have time or space to explain. The Tinder Swindler concerned conman Simon Leviev/Shimon Hayut, who posed as the son of a diamond mogul and persuaded marks to “lend” him huge sums of money to save him from supposed enemies. Then there was The Dropout, about Elizabeth Holmes, currently in jail for defrauding those who invested in her bloodtesting company, which could not do the things it claimed. We’ve had Inventing Anna, the story of Anna Sorokin/Delvey, who posed as a wealthy heiress among Manhattan’s elite, largely at their expense. After a string of dramas about real-life scams, I was beginning to wonder if anywhere was safe.

Anna delvey feet